Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

by Стив Хиллард

  Chapter 43

  PIECES

  The Topanga Commune Organic Restaurant had changed the menu — out with the squash and corn, in with the broccoli and spinach. The creek burbled. The overhanging oaks, brown-leaved and asleep, waited for spring.

  Cadence had a letter sitting on the table in front of her.

  “Go ahead,” said Jess, nodding at it.

  They often spent lunch hours here. Sometimes talking, sometimes just letting the time pass. These moments wouldn’t last, they both knew, but they were important for now.

  “OK,” she said, and opened the envelope from the Los Angeles School District. It was an offer for a full-time position teaching fifth grade, beginning in September. Yes, fifth grade. The age when a child’s ability to project and believe takes root or begins to wither in a long, weedy path of self-disappointment.

  She wanted to work in that garden. She had a week to decide.

  She handed the letter to Jess and said, “What do you think?”

  He read the letter. “Take it. You should stay here.”

  These days they talked like the reunited orphans they were, piecing together fragmented bits of a family. They knew that some pieces, a lot really, were missing forever. Others were being fitted together — cracked fragments of an enigmatic picture that was her father. Little details, tears, regrets, laughing. A lot of guilt de-crusted and examined and then put aside, like odd jigsaw pieces that you can worry over forever, or just throw over your shoulder and get on with the rest of the puzzle.

  He summed up a lot of the pieces in a few sentences. “I never knew my natural parents. Osley is my adopted name. I made myself up out of whole cloth after that. The name ‘Grande’? I got it from a dingy little coffee shop. In Seattle in 1970. A Starbucks, maybe the original one, trying to survive after the folk-music coffee house era They got their name from Melville’s first mate to Ahab. I took the name of their drink size. I never knew who to tell. Even Arnie. I never told anyone. So what’s a name?”

  “That’s poor comfort a couple of generations later, Grandpa, but well, I guess we’re in good company. Even Tolkien borrowed names.”

  “Maybe we should change it.”

  She laughed. “Hardly, I like it. I was born with it. I’m keeping it. So are you. This is all just gonna stick from now on. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “After all …”

  “What?”

  “A name is a promise that something exists. It’s strange, but for the first time in my life I feel that way about myself.”

  The pony-tailed waiter, John, came and cleared their table. They ordered a shared pot of the tea of the day, specially imported from some Malaysian village.

  She looked at Jess. “So what did you decide about the Forest? Are you, we, going to keep it open?”

  “I think so. It keeps things interesting. For me it’s like, well, traveling without leaving home. The old weirdness of the road sometimes just walks in the front door.”

  “Grandpa. There are some things we haven’t talked about.”

  “Really? Because we’ve done a lot of talking.”

  “I know, but I wanted to wait a bit.” She looked at him, studying his eyes. “Did Ara deserve to be erased? Like a traitor?”

  His look of astonishment was genuine. “What do you mean? She was a heroine. She saved them all.”

  “But the record from Frighten, the account of her betrayal?”

  “Rubbish. That was a snippet, a passing black cat that can mislead you, a misguided fragment of history. Look, if future historians dug out a Leni Reifenstahl flick, like Triumph of the Will, from the rubble of our civilization, they’d think Hitler was a stern but benevolent guy who ruled the world. It’s all happenstance.” Then he stopped. “You never saw the last chapter that I left on the desk?”

  “No, nothing. It was gone.”

  He recounted the destruction of the Source and the apparent end of the Dark Lord. “I guess he ended; at least that’s where the story ended.

  Cadence let out a slow breath of relief. She felt a quiet, solemn pride in having been a final witness to Ara’s journey. Her tale was gone, but it was enough to know that she had been true to herself.

  “What else?” Jess asked.

  “Oh, well,” Cadence recovered, “tell me some more about Professor Tolkien. Do you remember some other things about him?”

  “Some. Like a handful of snapshots. I remember his long-winded moments, his mumbling, his excitement about the stories he was discovering.”

  “But what about the documents, the Elvish.”

  “In truth, those memories are fading. I can see him unrolling the scrolls, his hands moving over the symbols, the sense of magical power imbedded there. But now, like the Elvish, it seems to be fading. More like something I read then lived. Maybe that was his point. Once in a while there’s no difference.”

  “So what about Osley and the Scissor Sharpener, Grandpa?’

  “It’s funny, I know they are, or were, me. But they’re the same way. At some point your past life gets to be like an over-read book. They were as real as the sunshine and breeze where we sit, but now they feel like exotic contrivances — lives I manufactured and dwelt in. Then I shed them. When I went away with the documents, I don’t remember much. I know I stood, naked and wrinkled. Exposed just as myself. Those people, Osley, the Sharpener, they fell away like old skins. They stayed there. They didn’t come back with me. As if all this had scraped me down— to a husk.”

  She let the silence unroll, looking at the man that was both less and more than the Osley-slash-Jess she had met. His mask, if he still had one, was just himself.

  He broke the interlude. “And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I finally knew the answer. ‘Do I stay or do I go?’ I finally knew — if I ever got out of there — I would stay. Right here at the Forest with you. As long as you would tolerate me.”

  “Sometimes I can’t help but feel that one, or both, of us dreamed all this up. What’ve we got to show from it?”

  “Everything. The main thing. You and I sitting here talking.”

  He reached part way across the table, his hands browned and purpled with liver spots. “At that pool, the thing that came home to me, finally, was that I couldn’t stand leaving all this unsaid, undone. You can’t make up for the past. But you can own up for it. That’s what kept me going. The rest was like a blur. Men and these gnarly, runty ass-hole creatures came and talked to me. They took the valise, then came back with an executioner. But I had the ace. The Vow! I shook it in their faces! Then I woke up.”

  “In Hoboken?”

  “I agree it sounds like a dream. A dream that lingers but doesn’t make sense.”

  “Forget it, Grandpa. It’s Middle-earth.”

  “Yes. But it’s gone now. All the Tolkien documents. All the originals. All the Elvish. Ara. Gone without a trace.”

  She hesitated. “Do you think the Dark Elves are gone?” Even as she spoke, the image of weasel eyes and ferret faces in the woods loomed up.

  His face darkened, as if a curious, fast-moving thundercloud had swept over a sunny day. She could see him drifting into that long-seeing gaze again as he mused out loud, “They are resourceful, and they want out of Middle-earth. In fact, they covet our world. They are subtle and they definitely don’t work for the Keebler Cookie Company. But … time will tell. Let’s not speak of them.”

  The shadow passed, and she asked, “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re the original, Grandpa. You’re the prize. That’s what I went searching for. However we got here, we got here.”

  He laughed. “Like you said, don’t ask. It’s Mirkwood.”

  The lunch was over. Birds wheeled above the trees toward a blue sky and puffy white clouds.

  “And what about the bills, the foreclosure?”

  “Its all on hold. Thanks to you, I’m not an ‘estate’ anymore. So they had to sta
rt over. Everett said to wait for a notice in the mail. Something will work out.”

  She looked over at the tiny Topanga Post Office, nestled a block away. “Well, stay here, and I’ll get today’s mail.” She hopped up and jogged over to the Post Office. She returned with an armload.

  “There’s a lot today.” She pulled up a stack piled high with the usual postal debris of unsolicited catalogs, flyers, penny ad papers, mortgage offers.

  They set to the stack like trash-pickers. Hiding at the bottom was a rumpled brown envelope. It was twine-tied, no return address. The stamps upside down and misplaced. It had forklift tracks down one side. The address for the Mirkwood Forest was printed as if by a nervous hostage working in charcoal.

  They both stared at it. “You open it, Cadence.”

  She undid the twine and pulled at the flap. She didn’t want to put her hand in there. She held it up, open at the bottom, and the contents spilled out: a pile of yellow legal sheets and Algonquin Hotel stationary with intense, familiar scribbles all over them.

  And, at the end, out plopped the tooth. Jess stared in disbelief. “Be careful! It could be another trick, maybe from that Barren thing!”

  She reached over and picked up the talisman. “I don’t think it’s a trick. I think it’s his way of evening some things up with his former … employer. Barren’s little diss to the Dark Lord by sending all this to us. And the tooth,” she held it up firmly in her hand, “it’s still searching for someone to believe in it, to receive its luck.”

  “Well, maybe that’s both of us. And even more important?” He looked at her.

  She held up the piles of papers, clutched like a victory trophy. “Ara’s back!”

  “And you’ve got something to talk to Mel about.”

  Chapter 44

  DUCK SALAD

  “So, aside from thanking you again for picking up the tab at the Algonquin, that’s pretty much the story.”

  Mel listened. His iPhone was silent, resting ceremoniously to his right. It was untouched by his hand, which held one of the Peninsula’s embossed salad forks in mid-air. He finally took a bite.

  “Cadence, it’s a sad turn of events, tragic. If I hadn’t experienced one piece of it firsthand, I’d say you made it up (chomp), that it’s all bullshit. But since I can’t dismiss it all, I’ll go along.”

  He took another bite of the lunchroom’s signature duck salad, then continued, “Shame. I (chew) had imagined a great meeting.” His other hand swept in the air. “A big, top-floor, teak-lined conference room high above Century City. The publisher, maybe Alrop or Freidken, would be there (gulp), flanked by his VP of Sales. Two or three lawyers. One from an outside firm, maybe Brunson and Cayhill. The others, ‘his people,’ as he might say. Go ahead and eat.”

  She started on the salade Niçoise, glad to let him talk.

  “We would be there — you, me, some lawyer. Maybe Everett. We would have the upper hand. They’d say, ‘Where’d you get the documents?’ We would tell them, pointing out that they were a gift. They would politely ask questions, testing the edges for ownership. Everett would politely set them straight, then we’d get into some blah-blah about copyright. ‘What copyright?’ Everett would say, ‘It’s fair use in any case, allegory, dogs and cats, all that.’”

  He snuck in another bite.

  “Then (chew) I would take over. Look the publisher in the eyes, point my index finger down on the table like so … and I’d say, ‘Buy this now and I can keep it off the storyboard circuit. Let us walk out of here and we’ll have ten competing bids by tomorrow. You’ll never get this back!”’

  She put her fork down and let him continue.

  “They’d pause for a moment. See, they’d already prepared for this. Their outside attorney would lean in, fold his hands, and say, ‘To resolve this matter, we are willing to put X’—call it whatever you want for purposes of this conversation—‘on the table. Total residual rights. We publish it or bury it at our discretion. You and your clients walk away.’”

  “And right then and there we have them. Now, as they say, we know what they are and the only question is the price. Plus a few other terms, of course, like them paying my outrageous fee separately.”

  Cadence put down her fork.

  “Mel, you really do live inside your own movie. Do you write the script dailies up every night?”

  “No, butterfly, I make it all up as I go.”

  “Well, the bad news is that the original documents are gone, I’m sure of that. Want the good news?”

  “There is some?”

  “We got a package. No return address.”

  “Wait. I got it. From your Mr. Osley. The Figment. Another magically there and gone again character.”

  “Figment? He was real as you are, Mel. But no, not from Osley. Listen, you called me, scared as a puppy. Peeing all over yourself about the mysterious offer. I still don’t buy all you’ve been telling me.”

  “It wasn’t very magical. Just a nasty squeeze. Dressed up as business but the menace and the message came through, all right. I’d say it was the Mafia but they don’t care about books and they don’t play with riddles. Your lives were threatened, which I was considering, and then mine, whereupon I immediately took action.”

  “And one more time, who was saying this to you?”

  “It was all by phone, and the message by courier. The voice, he knew the industry well enough to pull off some lines. Clunky and borrowed, like he watched The Directors a few times and was a quick study.”

  “Any accent, odd figure of speech?”

  “The speech was, oh, imagine a Bulgarian that learned English from watching American TV. It wasn’t just a crank. Like I said to myself, when it’s your ass, you gotta believe. So anyway, what was in it? The package?”

  “Ah, that’s what’s interesting. Not the Tolkien documents. Not the originals. But all of the translations.”

  “So, the original stash of documents, the invaluable for-sure-Tolkien-owned-it stuff, the ones pretty much verified by Mr. Bois-Gilbert and his Inspecteurs, the ones I saw here at this table? Gone?”

  “Yes.”

  Mel sighed and put his chin on his fist, dejected.

  “What’s so wrong? There’s still the story. If that’s the thing, and all stories continue, who cares who wrote it? She, Ara, was really real.”

  “What, you’re believing your own soup now, Cadence? What’s missing is the proof. The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that makes it all sellable. Let me boil it down for you: It’s not the story, it’s the sales.”

  “I disagree. In fact, that, right there, is where I learned we are very different. I don’t give a damn about money except to fix something broken in my life. But you, you do.”

  He waited.

  “So that’s why I’m going to give you one last chance. I want you to set up that meeting with the publisher.”

  “There’s nothing to go on. No one will take the meeting.”

  “I don’t believe you for a second, Mel. You know deep down that this is a real thing. Like you said, people want to know. And the most important part, the story that’s just as magical, is the bigger part about how it came together. Me. My grandfather. Osley. Even you. See, Mel, when this gets written, you’ll be in it. You’re an aspiring author yourself. Come on. You’ll love it.”

  She pulled her keys from her purse, signaling an end to the lunch. A large tooth was attached to the keychain.

  “That’s some tooth. You grow that yourself?”

  “I found it, lost it in a way, and then re-found it. It’s a good-luck charm, but only if you believe. Otherwise it’s bad luck. I carry it, because, in a way, you taught me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “About stepping up and betting your life on things. Take your cynicism, Mel, your greatest asset. I would hedge your bets before relying on that.”

  Before he could speak, she stood and offered her hand. He rose and they shook hands.

  “Goodbye M
el.”

  She turned and walked down the hallway toward the foyer, thick with an exuberance of orchids in Sevres vases.

  Mel’s iPhone buzzed angrily. He let it ring.

  Chapter 45

  SUITS

  The view from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the thirtieth floor conference room looked south, across Century City. It was hazing quickly in the L.A. smog, suggesting the low, boxy outlines of the Twentieth Century Fox studios.

  The conference table was massive in breadth and length, done in some obscure, threatened rainforest wood. It boasted seating for twenty in chairs finished in some obscure, threatened animal hide.

  Like many expressions of opulence, this combination of window, light, rare wood, and rare leather was hardly intended for meetings. It was an instrument of intimidation.

  Cadence and her grandfather had been ushered into the room alone and left waiting. To stew. To take in the power.

  The door opened and in came the suits, two men and one woman. First came the legendary publishing executive, tall, immaculate, with a full head of gray hair coifed to slightly long, Hollywood-irreverent length. Flanking him was the grim senior law partner. Next came the shark-like associate, the ace, the lady attorney with Ivy League training and acid for blood. Behind them, looking rumpled despite his fifteen hundred dollar Armani suit, came Mel. In this crowd, he looked like a used car sales associate hovering around for his commission.

  The suits worked the introductions, graciousness overplayed because they held the cards. They all sat down, each side arrayed across from the other.

  “Ms. … Grande.” The delay was calculated as the senior partner glanced down at their clothes, their status, then continued, “I want to thank you for coming here. My clients have reviewed Mr. Chricter’s query regarding certain … uh … supposedly lost documents owned by Professor Tolkien.”

  A long pause as he studied them.

  “We suggested this meeting to avoid any … misunderstanding.”

  More pause.

  Here the executive calmly put his hand on his trusty counsel’s arm, and leaned over. “Paul, let me step in here.” He looked engagingly across the table and folded his hands, pre-announcing the finality of what he was about to say.